September 27, 2017

On Tuesday, Twitter's global public policy team even posted a series of messages defending the service's policy to allow President Donald Trump to tweet messages that might otherwise violate Twitter's terms of service—including recent messages that appeared to threaten violence against North Korean leaders. The company described the president's tweets as "newsworthy," suggesting that Trump is not in danger of being banned from the site.

If you go to the "defending the service's policy" link, you'll see this (click to enlarge):

So the efforts to get Trump booted off Twitter will fail as long as Twitter wants them to fail, since the "newworthiness" factor will always apply to him but it's only a factor. Twitter has reserved the power to itself to decide whether or not Trump will remain on Twitter. It's a multi-factored test and Twitter assigns weights to the factors.

It's hard to see how it would not be in Twitter's business interest to have Trump participating, and not just because he has almost 40 million followers, but because his tweets — especially the ones people point to as violations of the terms of service — get embedded in countless mainstream news articles and passed on in social media.

If they banned him they'd be lucky to escape legal or regulatory scrutiny and they'd absolutely receive the effects of a public backlash. It'd be almost as stupid as insulting your fan base during the National Anthem.

It does undermine the concept of their "violating our terms of service" bans, because if "offensive language" or "threats" don't matter the minute your tweets are "newsworthy" (i.e., popular enough) then it makes no sense as applied to anyone else.

The analogy is I-66 (inside the Beltway) in Virginia--they don't allow trucks (even light trucks) but will allow buses (which are bigger) because the buses fulfill a public policy of mass transit. If the trucks aren't allowed because they're too big to be safe on that part of the road, then buses are just as unsafe.

"If they banned him they'd be lucky to escape legal or regulatory scrutiny and they'd absolutely receive the effects of a public backlash. It'd be almost as stupid as insulting your fan base during the National Anthem."

My thoughts exactly. I do expect antitrust scrutiny of Google, and maybe Amazon, Apple, etc. Twitter is likely on this potential list too. They picked poorly in the last election, having bought a place at the Dem's power table, and many have been double nag down since. If they aren't put under the antitrust microscope, the DoJ is even more rotten than I thought. For example - Google was recently called get doing the very sort of thing as Nicrosoft was caught by the DoJ doing - Google was "tying" use of their search engine to their Chrome browser, just like Microsoft was caught tying DOS to Windows 95 & 98.

Another place where Twitter is maybe more vulnerable than some of these other companies involves copyright infringement. The DMCA safe harbor for rebroadcast of copyright infringing material requires that the company doing such not be providing editorial control. I think that the heavy viewpoint suppression going on at Twitter could very well be seen as just the sort of editorial control that would let se this safe harbor.

As for regulatory control intersecting with the "resistance", I think that it was very significant that DirecTV has started letting customers out of their NFL contracts, on account of the protests. They are owned by AT&T, which is attempting right now to get antitrust clearance from the Trump/Sessions DoJ. I see this as potentially a bit of virtue signaling on their part, suggesting to the Trump Administration that they aren't part of the "resistance", part of the enemy, and maybe they should be looking more class sexy at companies that are, like Google, Twitter, etc.

It's pretty hard for the commander of the most powerful military in history to not threaten anybody. It's the very reason that power exists, that we pay for it, and that we hire a particular type individual to lead it. Properly done, that threat can same millions of lives when nothing else can.

Twitter is not the only service of its kind on the internet. If twitter bans Trump, he can go to one of Twitter's competitors and a huge number will follow him there, if only to see what Trump writes. Twitter doesn't want that competition.

Shouldn't the Left love this? It's exactly their playbook. Make a set of laws that makes everyone a criminal, then only enforce them against people you don't like. (Ex: IRS attacks against the Tea Party groups. Is Lois Lerner in jail yet?)

Twitter likes revenue more than it likes leftism (but not by much), so the "Rule by Men, disguised as Rule by Law" means Trump stays, while any lesser personality tweeting the same things would be banned. Or not banned, if his politics were the correct sort.